FreestyleFreestyle is a new non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering engine integrated into Blender. Originally developed as a stand-alone program in an academic research project, Freestyle provides artists with a new tool set for generating 2D line drawing out of a given 3D scene prepared with Blender. Generated lines can be stylized by a variety of stylization options for tweaking line color, alpha transparency, line thickness, and line geometry.

Motion TrackerCamera and object motion solver motion are much more accurate and faster because the Ceres library is used now for the bundle adjustment step. In addition the tripod solver is finally fixed and has become usable for longer footage. Smaller fixes were done as well.

3D PrintingAn addon to help with 3d printing is now bundled as well as a new ruler tool and mesh-analysis display attributes such as thickness, sharp-areas and distortion.

Cycles RenderA Subsurface Scattering shader is now available, to create materials such as Wax, Marble or Skin. Minimum pixel width was added to hair rendering and several performance improvements have been made, to render scenes without hair or motion blur faster. The OSL shading system received performance improvements as well.

Paint SystemThe stroke system and brush texture access has been unified and as a result there are many more tools now shared across paint modes. Brush angle control, better brush overlays, separate texture control for alpha and a brand new stencil mapping mode with direct mouse control have been implemented. Many improvements and bug fixes have also been made.

CompositingAdded border for compositor viewer node, which restricts what is to be composited for faster previews. Also border rendering and cropping are finally working as expected. Some optimization was done as well.

Node EditorNode Groups editing is less cluttered and more consistent with other nodes. Multiple node editor windows can be used independently. Nesting node groups is fully supported. Pinning is supported as well in the node editor to disable context switching.

Python NodesThe API now supports custom node types. Nodes can be defined and registered in python scripts like other UI classes. This allows the creation of entire new node systems for addons, external render engines and the like.

ToolsNew mesh modeling tools: Individual Face Inset, Poke Face and Knife Project. Faster image display in the image and movie clip editors. Better support for UTF-8 text in the text and console editors, and various improvements to other editors.